Movies Til Dawn

Herewith the middle section of the 1956 documentary "Music Of the South", a pioneering work on the orgins of jazz. If this post is your first find on the subject, simply scroll down to the previous post for an explanation of the films history. It's director was my father (he still is), Frank De Felitta, and his is the only print of the film extant. A reader named Ed made a very good point in a comment he left. That CBS had no problems showing the black workers in the field, but that the band they hired at the top of the program was an all-white one. According to my father, CBS wasn't exactly sanguine with the blacks depicted in the film. Or at least the wife of the President wasn't. Shortly after the airing of the film, he heard through the office grapevine that Babe Paley--wife of William S. Paley--complained to her husband about showing "ugly" people on the air and how he would lose viewership as a result. I'm not sure how the network founder and p...

It is with great pride and delight that I post the first two out of six parts of an exceedingly rare and important archival item--a documentary made by father, Frank De Felitta, called "Music Of The South". Photographed in 1956 in the deepest backcountry of Alabama, the film is a one hour exploration of the roots of jazz, focusing on the music of slaves and field workers. Interviewed are several descendants of slaves, who heard the nascent jazz sounds in the fields as children coming from their parents and grandparents. Even if you aren't especially interested in jazz or folk music, the opportunity to actually see and hear a descendant of a victim of "America's Original Sin" (Obama's great phrase) shouldn't be passed up. The film was commissioned by CBS as part of an educational show called "Odyssey" which aired on Sunday afternoons throughout the 1950's and into the sixties. Integral to the making of the film was F rederic Ramsey Jr., ...

Though it's practically unfathomable, it is actually the case that the dial telephone (which many of you reading this may not be old enough to have ever used) actually once required instructions on how to use it. You know--the phone you pick up and stick your fingers in the little holes that correspond with the number you want... ...even as I write this, I can feel how it ages me. Touch tone phones replaced the dial in my parents house in the late seventies. Still, the dial phone was a fact of phone-life for fifty or so years and at one time it was considered new-fangled enough to require an instructional film to be made about its use. Well, think about it. Your first experience with a computer wasn't exactly the smoothest moment of your life now, was it? And quite a few people I've met (almost all fifty or older) ask a lot of frankly silly questions about how to use their i-phones. Any strange new concept (like a dial telephone apparently once was) requires a few user tips...

As of tomorrow, 3/23/11, Movies Til Dawn will be back. So I needed a vacation...sue me... Tell your friends. Tell my friends. Tell yours and my enemies as well. I promise not to shill for "City Island" anymore. Until the next movie gets off the ground, I'll be posting some of the most fabulous archival footage of music, news, film etc. that hasn't been seen in years. Tune in tomorrow, my darlings...   Subscribe in a reader